Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Thought Eater: Emulation and Super-Intelligent Species

Again, these aren't by me--they're by a pair of anonymous DIY RPG writersfor the contest. Like yeasterday, each was assigned the same topic as a first-round opponent who didn't show up. So I paired two orphaned essays on different topics. We still have to decide which is better.

I have cleverly combine both topics in one image becauseThis Island Earth was originally a book.

Anybody reading is eligible to vote for which one you like best and voting will be cut off once all the votes for all the first round Thought Eater essays are up...First OneIf you like this one better, send an email with the Subject "EMULATE" to zakzsmith AT hawt mayle or vote on Google +. Don't put anything else in the email, I won't read it.

I like talking to a friend, my son calls Kügel, because he can’t pronounce his name well. He is a long-term philosophy student, gamer and avid reader of cheap fantasy novels. Today I talk to Kügel about “Evocation vs Imitation vs Emulation in adapting literary source material to RPGs“, my topic for the first round of the Thought Eater essay contest.

We have some difficulties defining the three terms, maybe because English isn’t our native language, maybe because we are not that smart. “To emulate“ seems to have two meanings.

1. imitate with effort to equal or surpass

If this essay is supposed to find out which of the three forms of adaptation is the best, emulation automatically beats imitation. Per definitionem, says Kügel.

2. The other meaning of “emulate“ is more interesting. A program can be emulated on a computer, it wasn’t originally written for. What the original program and the new program do looks very similar to the user, but the programs are actually different. Emulation in this sense works best when a text is adapted from one system to a similar system. The fairy tale “Hänsel und Gretel“ can be translated from German to English, for example. German and English are both languages. But can the story be emulated as a film? Or as an RPG?

At first, we understand the difference between evocation and imitation, but talking about it for a while, we get lost. To imitate means to copy superficial elements, all the details of a text. To evoke means to create a similar atmosphere, to write in a similar style, to copy essential elements only, like the more important parts of the plot or the structure.

“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre“ is a clever adaptation of “Hänsel und Gretel“. You have a group of young people getting lost in the wilderness. You don’t have two children abandoned by their parents. You have cannibalism, but no witch. You have an isolated house, but it’s not decorated with ginger bread. Both stories create a scary atmosphere.

Thinking a bit more about evocation, imitation and emulation, the lines get more blurry. Most texts which “evoke“ other texts also copy some superficial elements and emulation just seems to be a more accurate or better form of imitation, depending on how you define it. Kügel says the topic is unclear, because the terms we deal with are too similar. “And what is literary source material anyway?“, he adds. “The plot? The characters? The style of writing? The world the story creates?“

I propose to work with this: Playing an RPG, you can refer to a text in different ways. One extreme way is trying to imitate as many elements of the text as closely as possible. MERP springs to my mind. The other extreme way is to refer loosely to the text, in an abstract way, and only copy elements you find essential. “A Red & Pleasant Land“ does this. You could call both forms of adaptation “imitation“, the first one “emulation“, the second one “evocation“.

Kügel says: “Your essay will be disqualified. Let’s think about this in a different way. Try to be original. What works best for a GM?“ Kügel doesn’t like to work if he can avoid it. He says: “Which way needs less preparation?“

Well, if you are good at seeing the structure of a text, picking up elements that interest you, changing them, combining them with other elements and filling the gaps, a concept like “evocation“ works for you. If you are good at memorizing lots of information and reproducing it, a concept like “emulation“ works for you.

Ok. Here’s another, more personal way to look at it. As an experiment, I wouldn’t mind adapting “Hänsel und Gretel“ as an RPG and stick to the original as closely as possible. Of course, the first thing that would get lost in the process is the plot of the fairy tale and with the plot a lot of other elements would transform. Being an improvisational effort of a group of people, RPGs open up texts anyway. Because of this, one could argue, when adapting a text, a concept like “evocation“ works best with Role Playing Games. It gives enough space to improvise.

But there is something else. I usually don’t feel too comfortable with people who stick to all the details of a given game world and obsess about it. I live in Germany, a country populated by square headed people.

“You said, we were playing ‘Hänsel und Gretel‘, so why did we encounter a wolf on the way through the forest? This is not ‘Little Red Riding Hood‘, is it?“

“It was just a wolf, an animal. It didn’t say anything. It ran away.“

“Why do we keep finding little bones and wooden objects where we left the breadcrumbs? Where is the gingerbread house? And why did Hänsel just disappear? That wasn’t supposed to happen. Where is the witch? I don’t like this.“

Second OneIf you like this one better, send an email with the Subject "SUPERSMART" to zakzsmith AT hawt mayle or vote on Google +. Don't put anything else in the email, I won't read it.Ways to handle super-intelligent monsters

When handling super-intelligent monsters, there are three different options you have: Either you are super-intelligent yourself and can just emulate them as a GM, they are incomprehensible horrors from beyond time and space, or you gotta fudge it. Let's examine:

If you happen to own an intellect vastly superior to that of your players, super-intelligent monsters shouldn't be much of a problem. Just stop dumbing them down. Stat them, let their plots evolve and then have eat all those puny and unworthy player characters, anticipating their every move, knowing their very thoughts. As I'm writing this with the time-frame of the Thought Eater Contest in mind, I'm assuming you are not a superhuman artificial intelligence reading this, so the assumption is that you are only somewhat smarter than your players at most. If you read this in the future and you are in fact, some scary digital construct, good for you.

If you plan your super-intelligent monster as an incomprehensible horror from beyond time and space, things are easy to wing: Just have it do random shit and then enjoy the puzzled looks in your players faces. If you can shup up about this method, they may do a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to making up motivations for your Fauxthulhu. It's like when Star Trek fans invent theories about how the teleporter works. But you need not care: The thing is so incomprehensible, it's crazy. One moment it's all about attacking, then it recedes, maybe distracted by something happening in another dimension or whatever. It's probably also about as much capable of communicating with the player characters, as we are capable of talking to ants so you can save yourself quite a lot of thought on that side as well.

Where the real beef is, is a monster that is super-intelligent but only to an extend as to make it still comprehensible and capable of interacting with the players on a base that's more than what we would do with bacteria. Say you're fighting some mastermind who does indeed have motivations that the player characters can wrap their minds around but at the same time runs countless machinations to thwart any opposition. Of course you cannot outthink your players at that level – if you could, you'd probably play with someone else or be busy exploring the very fabric of space or creating ageless works of art or whatever super-intelligent people do.

You're gonna have to fudge it and your players will have to accept that. Whatever the player characters will come up with – the super-intelligent monster will have anticipated it and prepared for it. Retroactively set up traps (wherever nobody stepped/checked yet – the SIM of course knew where they'd look first!). Have sure-fire spells and surprises fail. The only real way to overpower something that smart should be brute force (if at all possible) combined with a true element of chance. Your players rolling dice to find out what their characters are going to do next won't cut it – it's gonna have to be an element of chance in-game. So if the characters decide to flip coins and leave things up to chance, then they may defeat the super-intelligent monster. Or they will just have to swarm the thing – two dozen cats could, after all, conceivably overpower a human. If they'd cooperate that well.
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2 comments:

I like the idea of retconning traps and the like. However, I think it would be cool to have some kind of mechanics behind it. Something like hero points, with just a tiny bit more structure to how they are spent and gained. If you play it like that, then even PCs can have fun with superintelligence.

Another way to play superintelligence is that it has effects like psychic powers. Telepathy, clairvoyance, and even probability control are all fair game. Not so much stuff like telekinesis if we're really just trying to emulate superintelligence...although you could play it that way, too.

I like the idea of retconning traps and the like. However, I think it would be cool to have some kind of mechanics behind it. Something like hero points, with just a tiny bit more structure to how they are spent and gained. If you play it like that, then even PCs can have fun with superintelligence.

Another way to play superintelligence is that it has effects like psychic powers. Telepathy, clairvoyance, and even probability control are all fair game. Not so much stuff like telekinesis if we're really just trying to emulate superintelligence...although you could play it that way, too.